AI: Show Me Your Tat

The other night, I saw one of the coolest tattoos I’d seen in a long time. This guy had a full sleeve design of the Galapagos finches surrounded by native flowers completely covering his upper arm. It was ridiculously awesome.

Tattoos are one of the ways the usually sterile, boring nature of science and math can be transformed into an exciting, sexy, exhilarating subject. Carl Zimmer, a science writer who presented at NECSS last weekend, keeps a compilation of these delightfully geeky designs in a section of his blog, which he calls The Science Tattoo Emporium. There are a lot of them. He’ll be publishing a book with the contributions entitled Science Ink, to be released in October.

Do you have any science tattoos? What cool geek tattoos have you seen? Do you think that tattoos about science make the subject more badass, or are they just geeky and ill-advised?

The ART Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Mad Art Lab community. Look for it to appear Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 3pm ET.

Ashley Hamer

Ashley Hamer (aka Smashley) is a saxophonist and writer living in Chicago, where she performs regularly with the funk band FuzZz and jazz ensemble Big Band Boom. She also does standup comedy, sort of, sometimes. Her tenor saxophone's name is Ladybird.

On principle I have to take issue with the statement “the usually sterile, boring nature of science and math”. My impression was that MAL was about fighting this unfair stereotype, so I’m sure you only used the phrase unthinkingly. Yes, there is boring and sterile science and math, but that’s not either’s nature.
I think sciency tattoos look fun, but personally I can’t think of a thing I’d like permanently etched on my skin. I like to have full freedom to change my mind about anything.

Yes, apologies for that wording. By using the terms “science and math” I was really referring to “the way science and math are portrayed.” I had considered editing the wording, and looking back, that’s what I should have done. I’d hope it would be clear that I don’t consider science and math to be boring by nature; otherwise my contributions to this site would appear to all be some extended form of masochism.